Solo Making Treasure Out Of Trash II

[Kelski]

Timestamp: 45th of Spring, 518 AV

Kelski wasn’t going to make the same mistake that another jeweler had done with the opals. Instead, she filled a porcelain crucible with sand, buried the opals in it so they weren’t touching each other or the sides, then nestled them into the hearth in Jaren’s room that was constantly burning. She didn’t put the container directly in the fire, but off to the side where it would stay uniformly warm and get ‘cured’ over the next few days. The curing would prevent any craze from happening from her cuts, then she could care for them. The sand leveled out the heat, evening it throughout the gemstones, and made the heat treatment far safer for the fragile finicky stones. Direct heat would work, but it could crack them when they touched surfaces, each other, or heated unevenly… causing the crazing or worse… total destruction.

Once the curing was underway and she was freed up, Kelski returned to the small gathering of stones and metal left to work. She ended up pulling three more opals from her pile of ‘to be done’ stones and looked them over. Under the lens, it was revealed she had three different types. They were all fire opals, but the first one was a small solid opal that just needed cleaning. The second opal was a doublet that looked to be two layers… a thin slice of well cut opal over the top of a black stone that looked to be really common onyx. Kelski tilted her head, judged that particular stone to just need cleaning, and perhaps set into something lovely to improve its value. The third stone was complicated. It was a triplet. That meant that someone had turned a pavilion of clear quartz, underlaid a layer of very expensive precious opal beneath it, and then put a dark stone beneath…a layer of common opal that had no nacre on it. It was a lovely setting, but perhaps had been passed off as something it wasn’t. The Kelvic deemed that one to be ‘clean only’ too.

Opals needed careful care. They were super porous and if they were layered like the doublet and triplet was, they could not be submerged. The solid opal she put a bit of soap into warm water and soaked it. Then she took a soft brush and scrubbed it clean and set it aside. The doublet and triplet she couldn’t do that too. The warm water might separate the layers and damage the stone. So she dipped a small rag in her warm soapy water and simply wiped down the two stones. Setting them all out in a row, she looked them over and decided three rings would be acceptable. The opals were stunning in their own right, so a fancy setting wouldn’t be suitable.

The largest opal she decided to place in a six-prong setting with just a singular solitaire band. Four prongs were secure enough, but opals were fragile and soft, so having six prongs nestled them in more securely and kept the opal in its place if a singular prong got damaged. Whereas, in a four prong, all it took was one prong getting loose and the possibility of the stone being damaged ran high. Kelski didn’t like taking chances with precious stones.

[Kelski]

Instead of using metal from her own stores, Kelski used the ‘scrap’ pile of metal and loaded all the gold into a small metal crucible and sat it on the forge. She stoked up the fire, set the metal to cure, and got out her set of ring molds. She oiled the molds well, selected a size six, seven, and eights and set the mold up. She added a wire mold thick enough to make prongs matching the ring and laid that out oiled too. The Kelvic Jeweler was sure she had enough material for the rings and prongs, so she left it to heat while she went back to the gem pile to look for other stones.

Kelski liked the doublet opal, but it wasn’t fancy enough on its own. If she snuggled up two gemstones of equal quality and color on either side of it, she’d have a truly impressive side-stone ring setting. That particular setting consisted of a center ‘star’ stone that was then showcased and enhanced by two smaller complimentary stones next to it. Such a setting gave the opal more brilliance and shine than the opal could have alone. And because she couldn’t use a pave or channel set (because the stones were going to be too big) she’d have to use round, princess or emerald cuts to have them look right.

Kelski drew out two ugly brown citrines that if they were treated right would and should be bright fiery orangish yellow stones with red flashes when heat treated correctly. They would compliment the fire opal perfectly if she could fix their color. That was the goal right? Treat all these subpar stones and reset them into superior jewelry so Jaren could turn a profit. When ugly citrines were heat treated, they turned into what was called madeira citrine. She wasn’t sure she could get the red flash out of the stones. It all depended if they had enough iron in the matrix and that wasn’t something Kelski could determine unless she actually got directly to heating.

So she did.

Watching the gold melting into a pool, Kelski knew that the citrine could be treated if she could gently heat it to incredibly hot temperatures. Her forge would do it, but only if she got the gold off first. So she prepared the stones by gently cleaning them, packing them in a sand pack, and got ready to pull the gold off and do the pour. Kelski put on her gloves, pulled the crucible from the forge, and carefully and patiently poured the three rings, and then filled the wire molds. The excess gold – she was happy to find there was excess – she poured off into an ingot mold that she’d also made handy just in case. Kelski’s pours almost always hinged on the thin side because Jaren rarely provided her with enough material and didn’t realize each time she heated metal she lost a bit of it.

[Kelski]

And often the quality was inferior so if he did buy ingots for her from Dagwoods, she’d have to skim off those ingots to augment the poor quality of the gold she was working with. When she was finished with the gold, she began adding buckets of coal back into the forge and using the bellows to heat it hotter, slowly drawing the temperature upwards. She placed the sand bath of brown citrines on the holder, kept working the bellows, and kept adding coal getting it hotter and hotter. Kelski was sweating and her hair was plastered to her neck and shoulders until she stripped off her shirt down to her chest wrap to cool off as she worked.

The Jeweler had to be careful. If she went to hot to fast, the citrine would go colorless and she’d achieve the opposite of what her Master wanted. If Kelski had a choice, she’d take a bit of the citrine and heat it up in short intervals. Then she’d note the intervals the citrine needed before it clarified and turned madeira. But she couldn’t do that because she didn’t have any throw-away pieces. So instead, she had to sit there, delicate long tongs in her hand and check the citrine every few minutes, watching the color changes. That was done by gently probing the sand, fishing one out, admiring its color in the cool light, and quickly inserting it back in the sand.

It took over a bell of hard pumping on the bellows and adding an outrageous amount of coal. Kelski’s chamber was sweltering and so was the Kelvic by the time she pulled the last check and judged the color perfect. She replaced the citrine back in the sand and replaced her small long tongs with big crucible tongs in which she picked up the sand filled bowl and moved it off to the side to carefully cool on its own time. Then she let the forge burn down to a more pleasant heat, and decided it was time to check on the pearls.

She visually checked the pearls that were still soaking in bleach. Kelski returned to where she had left the pearls soaking, pulled out a jar of just pure water, and began carefully fishing pearl by pearl by pearl with long tweezers. These pearls she placed in the water bath. Discarding the bleach solution out the window, Kelski took the water bath over to her source of water – a bowl and pitcher – and swirled the pearls around the rise water, dumped it out the window, and re-rinsed. She pulled the pearls out of the wash water, checked the color, and nodded to herself. They weren’t perfectly white, but they would be perfect for dying.

Kelski got out her powdered dyes. She carefully thumbed through the selection until she found a beautiful cobalt blue that reminded her of the sea at night or at least just after sunset. She filled another glass jar with water and began carefully mixing the powdered dye into the water. Then, carefully, she added the pearls one by one and then carefully swirled the glass bottle. She’d need to keep swirling it, moving it around over and over, to make sure the pearls didn’t rest against the bottom or each other which would cause them to dye irregularly. The dying process wouldn’t take long, but after about a half bell she checked the color saturation and once she was satisfied, she carefully pulled the pearls, rinsed them the same way she had when they were bleached, and set them on the side of the forge in a small jewelers tray to dry.

[Kelski]

Then she discarded the dye out the window. It was her catch-all garbage since she had no access to other means. The thick blackberry brambles all around the window meant no one saw her cast-offs or the fact she used the window to dispose of such things.

Now, the pearls taken care of and drying, it was time to head back to the molds. She carefully broke apart the ring molds, studied the circles of metal, and checked their fit against the ring wand that kept all rings exactly circular and exactly at the right size. She had to tap the smallest one down a bit, widening the soft metal to make it exactly a size six, before she laid them aside. Kelski wouldn’t bother to polish them until she had the prongs fashioned and attached.

The wire was a thick strand, easily the way it looked before she pulled it to form chain. She wanted it that way because it was the best way to create the prongs.

She used the raw wire, only pulling it through the wire form once to straighten it and make sure it was uniform coming out of the mold. Then, she got out the solid singular opal and held it above the ring, deciding how high she was going to set it. Measuring that distance, she noted the height and then set the opal aside. Carefully she began with a set of chain-nose pliers in each hand, she worked the wire into six lengths that would become prongs. She used her bench to tap the end of each length, flattening it, and making the fold that would seat against the band. Then she lit her alcohol burner and heated up her solder until she placed a bead of gold metal on the end, forming the clamping edge of the prong. Once she had six, she carefully mounted those six to the band with the solder, fluxing it well as she worked, glad the jewelery vice could hold the band steady as she was setting the prongs in place.

Next, she closely inspected the entire mounting for any problems it might have. At this stage correcting defects was easier than trying to do so once the stone was mounted. She inspected the prongs and then rechecked the measurement for exact diameter and height above the band. Kelski then leaned over her bench, gripped her bottom lip with her teeth, and straightened the prongs with her pliers. She was incredibly careful, not wanting to leave tool marks on the super soft metal. Kelski was then ready to polish the whole piece before the final setting.

She pre-polished all the surfaces inside the head and cleaned the mounting thoroughly. Most of the polishing had to be done by hand since the ring was way too small to be used on her wheel. She measured the stone yet again, meticulous, and then picked out a setting bur that was slightly smaller than the lower circumference of the gem. The girdle on this opal was a standard size, so she had burs already made.

[Kelski]

Then, carefully taking a pair of dividers, she etched tiny lines on the inside of the prongs to marked where the seat would be on each prong. Kelski stopped to stretch, muttered, and then began to move again. She then began cutting the seat in each prong with a small file. She was careful to cut each one individually and make sure she didn’t overcut and ruin the whole prong. She doused the ring in oil and kept cutting until the entire seat would hold the stone where it would set level at each side. Kelski was smarter than to eyeball the depth. Each seat needed to be between thirty and fifty percent of the prong thickness. She was careful to make sure when it was seated, the stone would sit level in each seat, and adjusted it as it needed to make sure the opal would be secure.

The Jeweler switched out her file for her knife-edged graver and removed the burs the file made from cutting the seats. The ring was ready for setting finally. She pre-bent the prongs just ever so slightly and then gently placed the opal on its setting. Kelski carefully tightened the prong tips with a prong pusher and made sure to align and square the stone before she got the prongs tight. Some of the prongs were slightly too long and she needed to grab a small jeweler’s saw to take the excess material off. Once the prongs were fiddled with and about the right length, she took a barette needle file and began shaping the prongs so they had a nice rounded edge.

Then she switched to a cup bur and made the final shapings of the prong tips. She made sure the openings of the interior cup matched the diameter of the prong tip. Then she used a graver to remove any of the metal scraps and burs from her cutting from around the prong tips. Kelski examined the final piece carefully and was happy with how it turned out.

The Kelvic only had to buff, clean and dry the mounting to completely have the ring done. It was exquisite with its heat treatment, re-cutting, and new mount. Kelski admired it as she cleaned it, set it aside, and looked over at what was left.

She had several more opals to mount, the two citrines on either side of the triplet opal, and the pearls to string and make earrings out of. Then and only then she’d go back to the ‘to do’ pile and find more projects until all the stones had been worked.

Kelski was tired. Tomorrow would be soon enough to put together the other two rings and string the pearls, both of which would take time, but not much effort. The faster she could pass them to Jaren the faster she could get to the rest of the 'to do' pile and finally be done.

[Kelski]

Grading

Kelski

Experience:

Jewelcrafting +5, Planning +5, Metalsmithing +1, Endurance +1

Lore:

JC: Heat Treating Opals, JC: Curing Opals, JC: Heat Treating Citrines (from brown to orange), JC: Making a Ring, JC: Making Ring Prongs, JC: Polishing Raw Jewelry